Print, authority, and the information lifecycle

By Patrick J. Lynch on March 25, 2009 9:54 AM | 1 Comment

There are two interrelated fundamentals when we look at the possible future of the printed page: the authority and trust we give traditional print media like major newspapers, magazines, and book publishers, and the pure utilitarian aspects of information printed on paper.

The authority and trust issue seems to be resolving itself quickly as major newspapers, journals, and magazines shift to fully-realized online forms. I have the same trust and expectations of quality from the New Yorker or New York Times sites that I have for the print versions. The shift has come more slowly in academia, where the print form of journals is still tightly bound to perceptions of prestige and importance, but even there the ground is shifting. The MIT faculty just made an aggressive public commitment to free web access to their scholarly publications, a welcome step toward taking science publishing out of the hands of high-cost high-profit commercial print publishers who have had a 100-year monopoly on "prestige" academic publications.

The continuing utility of print documents is another matter. Screen resolutions are getting better, but print still has huge practical advantages in reading, manipulating, annotating, and organizing large amounts of information that you are actively using in your work. I think it's best to think of digital and print forms as part of an information lifecycle, a concept I first saw well-articulated in The Social Life of Information.

I did an information lifecycle diagram intended for our latest version of the Web Style Guide, but in the end it didn't really fit into the book, but I've included it here. Click the graphic for a larger version.